Closing the Frontier, Opening Doors

In this article I examine a recent communal cocoa planting project in a Wide Bay Mengen community in East Pomio, Papua New Guinea in relation to histories of resource extraction. I discuss how the community members modeled the current planting of cocoa…

Skolt Sami and industrialization

This article shows how the Finnish state, in connection to international actors, has advanced industrialization, territorialization, and commodification on the Skolt Sami home grounds, and how the Skolt Sami people’s nature-linked livelihood activities…

Frontiers of Existence

This article introduces a new concept, ‘frontiers of existence’, to highlight and demand more attention be placed on the lives of human and other-than-human beings whose possibilities to exist are extinguished or radically and negatively transformed at…

Worship and the virus in Hindu India

The religious responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Hindu India were manifold and, at times, publicly contested, which raises the question of which societal differences became visible and were augmented as the pandemic unfolded. Based on observations m…

Minding the pandemic

This article analyses clusters of Muslim responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in a theoretical framework provided by the cognitive science of religion. The responses include theological reflections on the origin, nature, and religious significance of the…

Join the Holy Spirit on Zoom

The COVID-19 global pandemic impacted all social relations, including the way religious communities engage in worship services. Due to strict social distancing protocols, the only viable solution for many congregations was online worship. This article …

New religious movement responses to COVID

New religious movements (NRMs) have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic in diverse ways, ranging from closely following mainstream public health recommendations to explicit rejection of such guidance. This article considers the manner in which NRMs have…

Trust in crisis

Crises are associated with a search for meaning and security. In recent years, they have also been associated with increased attention to conspiracy theories. Such theories about COVID-19 have been many. We have looked at several COVID-specific conspir…

‘The wrath of God on children of disobedience’

The arrival of pandemic diseases (of which COVID-19 is the latest, but not likely to be the last) could be understood, along with impending ecological disaster and global warming, to be the major existential threats envisioned by, and facing, our conte…

Decolonising the COVID-19 pandemic

At its inception, the COVID-19 pandemic was described as something inherently new, capable of crossing and erasing the economic, racial, gendered, and religious divides that stratify societies around the world. However, the ongoing pandemic is not new …

Reply to comments

Reply to comments on Ernesto De Martino, La fine del mondo. Contributo all’analisi delle apocalissi culturali, new edition, edited by Giordana Charuty, Daniel Fabre and Marcello Massenzio, 2019 [fr. ed. La fin du monde. Essai sur les apocalyp…

Bao jiaozi

Jiaozi is an important festive food as well as a mundane stable food in Chinse culture. The duality of food raises the question how festive food is produced. This article looks into the material process of bao jiaozi – the collective making of j…